Chet Zar: Second Skin Group Show July 14th at Copro Gallery

By Chet Zar
I only discovered the tattoo community about 3 years ago when I was invited by tattoo artist Jon Lane to paint live at 2009’s Visionary Tattoo Art Festival. I was impressed from the start. Not only were these artists creating truly cutting edge art work on skin (conceptually, tattooing blows every other artistic statement out of the water, in my opinion), they were also painting as good as or better than a lot of well known contemporary painters I’ve seen. I was truly blown away at the variety of styles, techniques and ideas and wondered why I wasn’t seeing a lot of this stuff at the galleries I was showing at and going to, especially when a lot of the artists were expressing interest in showing at these galleries…

This is why I approached Gary Pressman of Copro Gallery about curating a group show exclusively for tattoo artist painters. I thought it might be a good opportunity for both the artists- to have their work shown in a non tattoo setting- and the gallery- to show new work by artists who have largely been overlooked by the non tattoo art world. Plus, I love curating shows that I would like to see myself, and this was one of them.

Cory Norris

Pooch

Nick Baxter

The artists in this show are higly respected and established artists in the field of tattooing. A few hold that same position in the art world, too, but not nearly enough. That is changing and it is exciting to see that change. I am hoping that the “Second Skin” show will be one more small step in exposing the art world to the depth of talent that exists within the tattoo community.